


Hic Sunt Leones

by dirtybinary, tibeyg



Category: Ancient History RPF, Punic Wars RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Crack, Implied Scnips, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 07:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14613324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tibeyg/pseuds/tibeyg
Summary: “Great Melqart,” said Hamilcar, “lord of the city, god of many wanderings, who hears my voice: when I prayed for my sons to grow into lions, this is not what I meant.”





	Hic Sunt Leones

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, Tate @catilinas!

 

  
**CARTHAGE, 238 BCE**  


“Great Melqart,” said Hamilcar, “lord of the city, god of many wanderings, who hears my voice: when I prayed for my sons to grow into lions, this is not what I meant.”

Hannibal prowled round the feet of the silk-draped altar, emitting a low growl like the rumble of thunder. Hasdrubal gnawed gently on his brother’s tail. Mago, only the size of a fat kitten, wobbled over on unsteady paws to headbutt his father’s sandal. Hamilcar sighed.  
  


 

* * *

  
**CARTHAGO NOVA, 221 BCE**  


It took Scipio hours to slip away—a full morning stuck in the vast palace on the highest of the New City’s five hills, listening to his uncle Gnaeus and the Carthaginian commander talk polite meanders around each other, Pyrenees this, Ebro River that; all the while the summer sun squandered itself on the wharves and docks and the blue lagoon glistened beneath. But neither his uncle nor his lictors seemed to notice when Scipio took a convenient wrong turn on the way back from lunch, so at last he was free to explore by himself.

He was skipping down a back stairway, slashing at imaginary foes with his dagger and picturing ways he could storm the city if he ever had to; and that, of course, was when he walked headlong into the lion.

He squawked. The lion _ruhhhh_ ed. It had been coming up the steps the other way, and Scipio reeled back with the force of the collision and sat down hard. He had never seen a lion, but he had read about them in his mother’s books, and he knew one when he fell over it on the stairs. The creature ambled closer. It seemed to be two parts mane—tawny and snarled, with stray blades of grass snagged in it—to one part sleek sinew, seams of muscle rippling down its powerful legs. Scipio, who had had a head full of Hercules ever since his tutor started him on Euripides, raised his dagger with a flourish. “Come no closer!”

The lion gave an irritated chuff. Then it settled back on its hind legs, went blurry at the edges, and rose into a man: a smooth, graceful change, as though that were a natural thing for a wild cat to do. Scipio glared at him. Of course they turned into lions. What a perfectly Punic pastime. “What were you going to do with that?” asked the man in crisp Lacedaemonian Greek, nodding at Scipio’s dagger. He was in his middle twenties, perhaps, with deep brown skin and dark curls that fell into his eyes in an admirably windswept fashion. “Embroider me?”

The dagger did look rather pathetic now that Scipio came to think about it, not at all what Hercules might have used to slay the Nemean lion. Then again, the Nemean lion had probably been more fearsome than this. The man’s chiton was grubby and torn, his sandals splotched with mud, and he still had the leaves stuck in his hair. “Is this what Carthaginian hospitality is like?” Scipio asked, picking himself up with as much dignity as he could muster. Despite his daily sacrifices, Jupiter Optimus Maximus had not yet seen fit to bless him with buttocks, and falling down _hurt_. “Turning into lions and sneaking up on guests in dark stairways?”

The man surveyed him with what appeared to be deep fascination. He was not very tall, and Scipio was standing two steps above him, so he had a long way up to look. “This is my family’s palace. So I believe that makes you the sneak. Do all Roman children make this much noise?”

“I’m fifteen,” Scipio protested. He had put on the  _ toga virilis _ nearly a year ago, but one could not expect these bizarre Phoenicians to understand such things. “What’s your name?”

“Hannibal.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t be facetious. You must be the proconsul’s nephew.”

_ That _ Hannibal, then. Scipio would never have guessed. The commander—one of the many outrageously handsome Hasdrubals who plagued the city—had greeted them in a diadem and a mantle of Tyrian purple, his belt worked with gold and amber, a miniature silver tusk dangling from one ear. This fellow could have passed for a slave, if one did not notice the fine linen of his chiton, but of course Scipio never missed such things. With trepidation, he wondered what his father and uncle would have done if he’d stabbed the son of Hamilcar Barca in his own palace. “The talks were boring,” he said. “I slipped off.”

Hannibal grinned. It came upon his face like a flash of lightning, quick and dazzling, a little askew in a jaunty way that went well with the glint in his green eyes. “So did I.”

“Really?” said Scipio. “Where’d you go?”

“Hunting, in the woods. It’s a lot more fun when you can turn into a lion.”

Scipio decided he liked Hannibal. It was hard not to, even if he had no dress sense. “Do it again.”

The green eyes went narrow. “Sweetheart,” said Hannibal, “we don’t let Romans boss us around here.”

“It’s not bossing you if you’re dying to show off,” said Scipio. “I know you are.”

“We don’t do it in front of outsiders.”

That made sense—that sort of divine favour was best kept secret and unleashed on the battlefield, and anyway it was well known by now that the new overlords of Spain were a secretive crowd—but all the same, Scipio was affronted. He put his hands on his hips. “I’m your guest-friend. You can’t be rude to me. Go on.”

The green eyes narrowed still more, but in a different, crinkly way this time, the kind of face people made when they were trying not to laugh. “Well,” said Hannibal, “if you insist.”

He shifted his weight as though they were about to spar, went blurry again, and then sort of—coiled up into the lion.

It  _ was _ a rather small lion. It sniffed its way around Scipio, pouring up the stairs and down again with its tail swishing, making a soft  _ prr prr _ noise that rather reminded Scipio of his sister Cornelia’s ferret when it was pleased with itself. He laughed, delighted, and sat back down to pet the lion. It butted him in the chest with its great head, not fiercely, and allowed him to pluck the blades of grass from its mane. There was a twig stuck in there, too. Hannibal must have had a good hunt. “Can you turn into anything else?”

The great cat flowed onto the step next to him, blurred once more, and unfolded into a man. “Just the lion,” said Hannibal, curling his legs beneath him with a vaguely feline grace. “I was nine when Melqart heard my father’s prayer. It took us a few days to realise we could change back.”

“Bet you didn’t want to,” said Scipio wistfully. When he was nine, the most interesting thing he ever got to do was play knucklebones with Laelius on the steps of the Curia while the Senate argued about Gauls and pirates. Perhaps if he sacrificed enough to Apollo Lycaeus, the god would turn him into a wolf, or something. “That sounds like so much fun.”

Hannibal smiled, as though reading his mind. “It’s hard to hold a scroll without thumbs. Anyway, there are plenty of fun things a human boy can do here. Where were you sneaking off to?”

“I thought I’d go look at the elephants. But my uncle’d kill me.”

“Not if you’re with me,” said Hannibal. He stretched and rose to his feet in a single fluid motion, tugging Scipio up with him by the wrist. “Come on. Surus might even let you ride him if you give him a melon.”

Scipio brightened. “Will he?”

“Yes, well,” said Hannibal, as Scipio bounded down the stairs after him, “unlike me, he doesn’t mind bossy Roman children.”

 

* * *

  


“This, my friends,” said Hasdrubal the Fair, “is my wife’s brother Hannibal.”

Gnaeus Scipio studied the man on the supper-couch across from him. It had seemed to him quite improper that he had yet to so much as glimpse the famous elephants, nor the infamous Barca boys, while his nephew had reportedly ridden one (elephant, that was) and befriended all three (boys). Now here at last was the elusive Hannibal, wearing the sort of thing young people wore when their elders wanted to trot them out: granted, trousers instead of a toga—great Jupiter, those looked tight and _obscene_ —but the air of long-suffering reluctance was the same. “ _Khaírete_ ," said Hannibal, and then in Latin, “Hello, Publius.”

Publius slopped wine all over himself. In recent days he had taken to swimming in the lagoon all afternoon, then languishing half-dressed on the shore while he gazed hopefully at the high windows of the palace, pinking by the hour like a prawn in a pan. His cheeks had gone bright red. " _Salve_ ," he said, and sank drippingly onto the couch.

Hannibal met his kinsman’s fixed smile with a bemused grin of his own. Gnaeus sighed. He would have to have a word with his brother about young Publius.  


 

* * *

  
**TICINUS RIVER, 218 BCE**  


The snow-crowns of the Alps hung lower than usual that year, and the face of the river was grey and bleak. So was the scout’s. “I swear it,” he said over and over, when they brought him into the command tent. “I swear, _there was a lion riding an elephant_."

They all looked at each other—the consul, the two praetors and all the legates, none of them quite seeming to know what they had just heard. Only the consul’s son Scipio—a string bean of a lad, barely eighteen, who seemed to grow another foot every time you turned your back—gave a whoop and bounced up from his stool. “That’s him!”

The consul sighed. “Publius—”

“I’ll go talk to him,” said Scipio, beaming as if the battle was already won. “Alone.” He buckled on his new cuirass with a clang, and as the bronze flared in the lamplight they all had to shield their eyes for a moment. The young menace had been shining the breastplate all morning, with an enthusiasm that was frankly lewd. “I promise you, there won’t be a war.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the CONSTANT AND TIRELESS lion symbolism in David Anthony Durham's _Pride of Carthage_ , and also by Val. Max. 9.3.2, in which Hamilcar purportedly says of his sons, "These are the lion cubs I am rearing for the destruction of Rome."
> 
> We're [@salinatrixx](http://salinatrixx.tumblr.com) and [@enemyofrome](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com) on tumblr. We also have [a very gay book-baby](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post) out now, written by Val and illustrated by Jocelin—do check it out!


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